AS TO DINING
Reading edition
YOUR DINING PLACE
ON'T begin by resorting habitually to the Quick Lunch. Nobody ever made friends at a Quick Lunch, except with the waitresses. Select a good place where there are lots of fellows whom you will see continually. You ought to pick out some good friends from among them.
YOUR TABLE
Don't attempt, in a large dining hall, to get a place at a society, club, or athletic table for which you have not yet qualified. You are liable to queer yourself from the start.
TABLE TALK
Don't try continually to air the sum of knowledge which you are just assimilating. There are few things more pathetic than the first-year chemist who keeps asking you at table to "pass the NaCl," or the fledgling psychologist who would try to prove that bread-and-butter is matter for the mind and not for the stomach.
DONT MONOPOLIZE THE CONVERSATION AT THE TABLE
LOCAL EGOTISM
Don't keep telling how they do things in that part of the country which you come from. The assumption is, that since you came to College, you are willing to learn something of how they do things here.
LISTENING TO OTHERS
Don't monopolize the conversation at the table, especially if there are older men around. You'll get yourself snubbed if you talk too much about yourself. Fellows don't care much whether your grandfather kept a brake and ten horses, or drove a "shay" over the plank-road. Be a good listener. Then, too, older men like to be listened to. The chances are you will learn a sight more by hearing them than they will by hearing you.
KNOCKING THE GRUB
Don't continually find fault with the things you have to eat. Act as if you were used to eating away from home. Half the time the jokes you make at the expense of the food come merely from an uncontrollable desire to air your wit. "Knocking the grub" doesn't require half so much brains or individuality as shutting up about it.